There are many questions, some of them metaphysical, to sort out after this premiere, but it’s a promising sign that the backdrop is at least as compelling as anything that happens in the fore. As the two main characters, Navarro and Liz Danvers (Jodie Foster), the current police chief, delves into two cases simultaneously, López gives Ennis interesting dimensions of its own, pausing to watch the town drunk slide across the intersection to collect her latest D.U.I. or noting the tenuous state of the drinking water. Most of the population in this working-class outpost is the native Inupiaq, who coexist uneasily with settlers who have turned a mine into a pollutant and cash cow.
On the fringes of the fringe, 150 miles north of the Arctic Circle, eight researchers go missing from the Tsalal research station, and it’s made to seem like either black magic or an extremely ill-advised walkabout. We get a few glimpses into their last moments together: One scientist kicking back to “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” with a bowl of popcorn, another doing a video call in Spanish, and still more on a treadmill, in the laundry room, in the lab or constructing a ham sandwich. Then we see another man shake uncontrollably and utter the words, “She’s awake.”
Later, when a delivery truck pulls up with supplies, the driver finds an empty building. The camera finds a tongue on the floor.
As Danvers, Foster can’t help but suggest a thoroughly disillusioned version of her most famous character, Clarice Starling in “The Silence of the Lambs,” but there’s a little of Kate Winslet’s “Mare of Easttown” to her cynical, slightly discombobulated regional sleuth. She’s Liz of Snowtown. At the research facility, she’s able to estimate the time these men disappeared based on the mayo consistency in the uneaten ham sandwich. (“Mayo doesn’t go runny until a couple of days out of the fridge, but your processed cold cuts will survive the apocalypse.”) When she examines the severed tongue, the one piece of unsettling evidence they have, Danvers can deduce by subtle striations that it belonged to an Indigenous woman who licks the threads of fishing nets. She’s good.
Navarro is skeptical of Danvers, to put it mildly — not so much her skill as her initiative. While serving as a detective, Navarro obsessed for months over the savage murder of a young Indigenous activist who had attracted a lot of “haters” for her protests against the mine. Danvers inherited the case and let it go so cold that one of her deputies, Hank (John Hawkes), wound up keeping the file box tucked away in a spare bedroom. Hank’s son, Peter (Finn Bennett), Danvers’s baby-faced protégé, smuggles it out the window to get it to her.
